


the night keeps looking our way

by elle_stone



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Angst, Arkadia, Canon Universe, First Time, M/M, Season/Series 03, alternate s3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-29
Updated: 2017-03-20
Packaged: 2018-09-20 14:53:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9496979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_stone/pseuds/elle_stone
Summary: They don’t have conversations anymore, not like they used to. Jasper can’t even look at him now, not without that strange accusatory expression in his eyes, and there’s no way even to make small talk about the weather when someone is looking at you like that. There’s certainly no chance to talk about anything important, to askare you okay?and expect an answer, to ever tell the truth. Monty doesn’t like to let Jasper leave his sight, but he can’t force much more than his own silent company and watchful eye. He gave up those aspirations weeks ago. So this, a question he can’t place as conversational or accusatory or curious, but which hits at the deeply personal and private, completely unnerves him. It sets off something in him, his own sharp curiosity and an unpleasant desire for confession both. He wants to be insulted, but he isn’t.Monty finds Jasper drinking alone in the Arkadia commons. Jasper starts asking uncomfortable questions.





	1. part one

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this after 3x01 aired waaaay back in January of 2016. Then around the time S3 ended I took a six month break from it, which is part of why I'm only starting to post it now. This fic takes place in a slightly alternate universe, in which Monty and Bellamy do not separate from the rest of the group at the end of 3x01, but instead return to Arkadia. Everything else from the first episode, including, most importantly, Jasper's attempt to commit suicide by Grounder, is the same.
> 
> This story is labeled 'underage' and rated E because it includes sex acts between two characters who are 15/16 in the canon. The explicit content is entirely in part two.
> 
> The title is from Deciding by Saves the Day.

From the doorway, Monty has a decent  view of the entire commons. But he doesn’t need it. His eyes snap to Jasper immediately. He tells himself it’s because Jasper is his best friend, because they know each other so well, have been connected so long, that some force beyond explanation draws them together every time. But he knows better than that, really. He knows where to find Jasper because Jasper is always in the same place, every night, his movements so predictable t hat even people who barely know him , know him now by sight. H is reputation has started to precede him.   


Monty hesitates a moment in the doorway, telling himself more lies. There’s no reason to pause, the liar in him says. It’s just Jasper, the defiant voice says.    


Still, he takes a deep breath before he walks over. He puts on th at affect that says _everything is fine_ : a little part he plays because he thinks it might help Jasper, eve n if neither of them believes it; that he plays because, in the end, he doesn’t know any other way to be.    


Jasper’s slumped forward with both his arms on the table, hand wrapped around his glass, holding it close to him as if he wanted to protect it, or guard it. There’s no one on either side of him. He gives off waves of unfriendliness.    


Monty skips the pleasantries. “I’ll be taking this,” he says, instead, by way of greeting, and slides the glass right out of Jasper’s hand in a movement so fluid and quick, Jasper’s barely looked up and it’s gone. Monty flicks his eyebrows up, his reminder that he won’t take any shit, and grabs the chair next to Jasper, takes a drink himself. The glass is only half-empty. He doubts Jasper’s been here long.    


Whatever it is, it’s utterly vile, but Jasper doesn’t crack a smile at the face Monty makes. Four months ago, he would have. “This is disgusting,” Monty declares.    


“So give it back,” Jasper answers, and reaches out an arm for it. Monty slides the glass away. This is not a game, because Jasper doesn’t lunge after it, doesn’t mime an attack; he just scrubs his hands over his face and groans, a weary sound. At least he’s not leaving to pour himself another, which is some small victory. He just stays where he is, stilled by inertia perhaps, rubbing the heels of his hands against his eyes.    


The silence is too unbearable. Monty busies himself pretending to care about the drink, taking another tentative sip, tapping his fingers against the glass. “Nothing like we used to make, is it?” he asks.    


“Not criminal- grade quality, no,” Jasper mumbles, and lets his hands fall down against the table top. “You can give it back. I’m not drunk.”    


“Yet. I told you, this one’s mine.”    


He’s debating whether or not he should just down the rest, if this will make Jasper more or less likely to stand up and walk away—just another way of asking himself why Jasper hasn’t left already yet, and if this is progress—when he’s startled quite abruptly from his vague half-thoughts. He’d been staring down into the glass, not unlike the way Jasper often stares down into his glass, unaware what he looks like and unaware that Jasper has started watching him. Jasper’s sitting now with his elbow up on the tabletop and his cheek resting against the palm of his hand, turned toward Monty and just staring, like trying to learn him, or re-learn him.    


It’s Jasper’s voice that startles him, Jasper’s voice barking out a little too loud, a little accusatory and cruel.    


“Are you fucking Miller?”    


The question is so out of nowhere, and so ridiculous, that he can’t find the voice to answer right away. He just stares at Jasper as if staring at a stranger. The only answer he can give is a strangled and oddly pitched, “What?”    


“Are you fucking Miller?” Jasper repeats, slowly this time, measured and insistent.    


“No,” he says, the words he’d meant to say all along finally managing to form, with a heavy, implied  _obviously_ underneath. “Why would you even ask me that?”     


Jasper straightens, lets his hands fall down to his lap, then slumps again. The posture makes him look defeated, but Monty won’t attach a petulance or annoyance to his words. He can’t go down that road; he can’t assume that’s what they mean. “Because he obviously wants to. He flirts with you all the time.”    


Monty opens his mouth to answer  That’s ridiculous , but the words don’t come. What he really wants to say, what he has to choke back, is another why . As in Why have you started this? What are you talking about?      


They don’t have conversations anymore, not like they used to. Jasper can’t even look at him now, not without that strange accusatory expression in his eyes, and there’s no way even to make small talk about the weather when someone is looking at you like that. There’s certainly no chance to talk about anything important, to ask  _are you okay?_ and expect an answer, to ever tell the truth. Monty doesn’t like to let Jasper leave his sight, but he can’t force much more than his own silent company and watchful eye. He gave up those aspirations weeks ago. So this, a question he can’t place as conversational or accusatory or curious, but which hits at the deeply personal and private, completely unnerves him. It sets off something in him, his own sharp curiosity and an unpleasant desire for confession both. He wants to be insulted, but he isn’t.    


Worse even than this stupid hope, that maybe this is the strange coming of a thaw at last, a return to how they used to be, is the  way that Jasper is looking at him. He isn’t staring, which would at least be familiar. Everyone knows Jasper’s dagger-stare by now, his eyes too round, a primal and animal warning in them— _he looks like he’s picturing wringing your neck_ , Harper said once, in an awed, sad, and quiet voice. What she means is there’s no shyness left in him. That’s the worst part of the dagger-stare, for Monty: it reminds him that something sweet and young and open in his friend has died.    


It doesn’t help that he thinks he might see a ghost flicker of it now, in the way Jasper is looking at him without really looking, glancing up only, his head tilted down.     


“He doesn’t,” Monty answers, finally. The words sound like nothing after the long, uncertain delay. “He doesn’t,” he says, again, and then, “And he has a boyfriend.”    


“His boyfriend’s probably dead.”    


Monty’s learned not to doubt Jasper’s capacity to be cruel. He knows what he’s saying, and he means it just how it sounds. He means  _Farm Station is probably dead_. He means _Your parents are probably dead_. It’s hurtful, but more than that it’s just a little bit infuriating; Monty takes another bitter drink and slams the glass down again on the table top, hard enough to make Jasper jump—and that, he admits to himself, is satisfying.    


He’s about to say  _You just want us to be orphans together to_ o, but he’d hate himself if he did. Jasper would hate him. Jasper already hates him, and most days Monty doesn’t even fight the feeling that he deserves it. All he can do is try to deserve that hatred less each day, and digging at fresh wounds, being unnecessarily cruel the way Jasper is unnecessarily cruel, letting himself break against the barrage of hurtful things he hears from his old friend every day, and resorting to the same, that’s no way to prove his devotion. So he bites the words back. They are bitter, too. He can’t forget the taste of them.    


Worse, he’s been the one to insist again and again that the  Jordans  are still alive. He’s been unflaggingly hopeful. He’s said things like  _We haven’t found Tesla yet. It could be out there_ and _You’ll see your dads again_ , and a whole variety of other empty assurances and promises he cannot keep. And he’s watched Jasper scowl at him and look away. He’s listened to non-answers, to the way Jasper mutters under his breath or snorts, dismissive, derisive, and he’s forced himself to be optimistic each and every time, because he has to be. He tells himself it’s because the  Jordans  were like his fathers, too, and the thought of never seeing them again might be the last straw that breaks him. But that’s not it. He wants his own parents, and if he lets Jasper convince him that  Arkadia  is truly the last of the Ark as they knew it, he’ll have to mourn his only family, and it’s that particular sadness that he cannot afford.     


“We don’t know that,” he says. He means to sound insistent but he comes across weak, unconvincing even to himself.    


Jasper doesn’t even bother answering.    


Monty feels his own shoulders slump, and the silence between them settles heavily. At other tables, people are talking. The background murmur of their casual conversation, the loud-soft ebb-flow of anonymous voices, the occasional sharp fit of laughter, makes the heavy weight in his throat all the more painful; every second he’s more certain that he’s lost his chance. He won’t himself quite put into words what sort of chance it was.     


It’s been a long time since Jasper has started a conversation with him. To hear his friend reach out to him again in any way would be one thing, would be enough, but this particular conversation—was he just trying to be shocking? Was he finding a new way to be hurtful? Or was it something else? Monty tells himself, again and again like a mantra until it drowns out all other thoughts:  _don’t assume don’t assume don’t assume_ . Don’t believe that Something is Happening, don’t let in this feeling, this stupid feeling, this stupid adolescent feeling. It sits poorly on him now, like clothes he’s outgrown. And yes, he used to know it well, but that was another life, his Ark life, and it’s so distant that his memories of it feel like another person’s memories, gauzy and faint and pale.    


Monty’s gaze snaps up when he hears Jasper’s chair scraping back and his low voice muttering, “I’m getting another drink.” Without thinking, Monty reaches out his hand and grabs for his wrist, half-expecting to be shaken off and surprised, stuck, when he’s not.     


“Jasper—”   


The argument he was expecting doesn’t come. Jasper doesn’t say a word, doesn’t walk away; he just sits down again, and when Monty lets go of his wrist, he reaches out and takes back the drink that Monty took from him, and downs the rest. Then he just waits, completely still except for his thumb moving up and down the side of the glass.    


“I’m just pointing out the obvious,” he says.    


Monty’s not sure if Jasper means  _the obvious about Farm Station_ or _the obvious about Miller_ , but either way he knows the conversation isn’t over, which feels like an unearned relief.    


“So do you want to fuck him?  Forget about the boyfriend—”    


“His name is Bryan. And stop that.”    


“Stop what?”    


“Being so… crude.” He winces at the word before it’s even out of his mouth, and he doesn’t have to look up to know Jasper’s rolling his eyes at him. He’s expecting some response like  _didn’t know you were so uptight_ , and because he isn’t, and because that isn’t the point, he adds quickly, “You’re not going to get a reaction out of me.”    


There’s a slight pause, and then Jasper mumbles, “Haven’t gotten an answer either.”    


A series of retorts occur to him— _shut up; and you're not going to; why does it matter? why do you care?_ —but all he says is, "You can't—" and the rest won't come. He could shut the conversation down if he wanted to. He knows Jasper well enough to push his buttons too. But he doesn't want to go back to their strained silence and uncertainty. Obnoxious as Jasper's baiting is, insulting as it is to be his target, or his plaything, there's still something stupidly exciting to this conversation and he can't let that feeling go. Jasper's questions aren't just personal; they're intimate. Stripped of their language and tone, he's doing no more, really, than asking Monty, _so_ _do you_ **_like_** _him?_ , a question he has never asked, a topic they have never approached.    


Even when they were best friends, when Jasper was his confidant in everything, or almost everything, even then they never talked about boys. An unspoken rule between them seemed always to forbid it. They talked about girls, or Jasper talked, at least, and Monty listened. He never minded listening. Sometimes, he even felt a spark of something too, something that he used to think was an attraction for these girls, spread like a contagion from his best friend to himself, until he realized in a very stark and undeniable way that he was wrong. His affection was for Jasper, for the way he smiled when he said the word  _beautiful_ , as in _she’s so **beautiful** , isn’t she? _ , for the way he stared at them with equal parts appreciation and awe.    


Among his confessions—including, the most difficult one, late one night at the  Jordans  ’ and staring into the dark, that girls just really…weren’t for him—was never this:  _please don’t ever notice that I stare sometimes like that too. Not at those girls, and not at random boys. At you ._ __

Jasper reaches out a hand and shoves at Monty's shoulder, a gesture that would be friendly if there were just the slightest bit less force behind it, if his expression didn't look so much like a leer. "Come on. He's there for the taking."    


(His own words coming back, reminding him, mocking him:  _You've got to be kidding me. That_ _was there for the taking_.)    


"Shut up. I'm not interested in Miller."    


Though he's given no confession, Jasper still looks like he's won; he pulls his chair closer and leans into Monty's space. His hand, his fingers looking like skeleton fingers, too thin and too long, grabs too hard at Monty's arm just below his elbow, and won't let go. "But it would be so easy. He's probably in his room right now. Just walk down there and knock . He won’t even ask any questions, he’ll just be glad you’re finally taking the hint. Months of hints. Hints from today, even.”    


Monty leans in too. His heart is beating hard because Jasper is too close, but he pretends it’s not, pretends there’s no lump in his throat. “You’re not going to rattle me,” he repeats, “and you’re not going to get rid of me. I’m not going to walk off and leave you here so you can pass out  drunk on the floor for the third night in a row.” _Not after today. Not when I know that you probably pass out half-hoping you won’t wake up._ __

Jasper’s grip on his arm tightens.    


"Is that the only reason?"    


He could snap,  _of course not, I just said not or even I don't care, you **know** who I care about, stop_ _,_ but he understands by now that this a test. Jasper is always testing him. That's how it feels. And this baiting, invading, low and insistent tone, gaze that won't let him look away—it's so obviously a challenge, but at least it's one he feels instinctively that he can win. A challenge of loyalty, maybe, or dedication, or love.    


He puts his hand on top of Jasper's hand and presses down.    


"You holding out for someone else?" Jasper asks. These words, an echo too, don't come out as taunting as he might h ave wanted them to ; they're a little too quiet, and too uncertain.    


Monty can't blame him for the way his voice waivers, falters like another word could break it, because he can't bring himself to speak at all. Maybe he was wrong. He shouldn't have let Jasper start this, not fully knowing what this was or where it could lead; the risk of it is bigger for being undefined; the contours even of words are uncertain and he can't move slow or be safe or leave room for retreat. It's jump forward or fall all the way back. It's all or nothing. He knows this like instinct, without putting anything into words.     


Later he will think, no, he made no decision here. He did not  choose to be vulnerable. He simply was .    


He gives a little nod, and—“Yeah”—a word so quiet it’s more jagged hum than real response. He’s staring down at their hands. They look so familiar, and so foreign. And there are people all around them creating a background chatter hum but those people feel and sound so far away he's half-certain they've fallen off the edge of the Earth, that they are alone, they are together and alone.    


When he looks up, Jasper is staring right at him, eyes just a little too wide and very bright. His gaze shoots left and then right, scanning over Monty's face, and he gives the very slightest of smiles. "Yeah?" he echoes.    


A flash of their old lives returns to him, sudden and startling. When one of them came up with a bad idea, a bad idea that sounded like a great idea — let's make moonshine, let's steal those herbs, let's get high at the Unity Day Dance — and the other would just grin, and nod an I'm-in nod — and especially when it was Jasper who just couldn't wait to agree and his eyes would spark in just this way —i t felt like this. He doesn't care, now, that there's something crooked in Jasper's smile and something off in his gaze. His gut tells him _just like old times_ and he feels himself leaning in.    


Jasper doesn't move to meet him, though. The moment Monty thought was building falls apart and then reforms, and he hears as if spoken direct l y into his ear a low murmur: "So would you go to his room?"    


"If he asked." He pulls at Jasper's hand, still clinging with a bruise-strong grip to his arm, and holds it between both his own. The gesture is meant to be sweet, but it earns no response, not even the curl of fingers around his own.    


“He’s asking.”    


The words sound like a dare.    


Without thinking, without letting himself think or question, without even letting himself feel the too-hard beat of his heart or the sick-nervousness rolling up in his stomach, he gets to his feet and gives Jasper’s hand a tug. “Then let’s go.”


	2. part two

Upon his insistence, Jasper was assigned solo quarters in the new Arkadia: a small, undesirable bit of space all his own in the dark back-annex of what was once Alpha station. Monty has helped him stumble down this hallway plenty of times in the last three months, but he’s never been allowed past the threshold. Even at his worst, little more than drunk dead-weight, Jasper’s always been able to shove him off just as he fumbles for the handle of the door. “I’m fine, I’m fine,” he always slurs, and slides inside, leaving behind only a slab of opaque grey metal and the echo-click of his lock. 

So it’s odd to see it now. Jasper’s bedroom is nothing like his bedroom on the Ark, a room Monty knew about as well as his own. That room was always a mess: clothes strewn about, unpaired socks over the back of a chair, t-shirt over his desk lamp, his few possessions scattered across his desk, the floor, the foot of his bed. Everywhere there was the detritus he’d been gathering for as long as Monty could remember: other people’s old junk grabbed at the market, objects picked up through unofficial trades, his knee guard, his goggles. In another life, he probably would have been a hoarder. That’s what Monty used to think, at least, and what he used to tease him about.  

But this room is different. It’s immaculate. All his clothes are put away, his floor is clean, and his bed is not only made, but made perfectly; it looks like it hasn’t been slept in for days. There’s nothing on his desk but a lamp, his music player and earbuds, and, bizarrely, incongruously, a stuffed toy bear, set against the wall. The bear looks oddly familiar. Monty stares at it for a long while, trying to place it. And during all this time, Jasper is silent, almost suspiciously so. 

When Monty looks up, he’s so startled that he takes a step back and toward the door, as if Jasper had taken a swing at him. His friend has stripped down to nothing but one sock. Now he’s in the process of pulling that off, too, hopping gracelessly on one foot until the sock joins the rest of his clothes in a vague pile by the side of the bed. 

“Jasper—what the fuck—what are you doing?” He doesn’t care that his voice sounds scandalized, because he is, a little, and very confused. He’s pretty sure he’s had erotic dreams that went something like this, but now that he’s living one it’s more twisted surrealist nightmare than anything he’d call a fantasy. There is every possibility Jasper is just trying to mock him, or hurt him, using old secrets as punches to the gut. 

“Getting to the point,” he answers. “And making sure I don’t lose my nerve.” 

Monty’s half-formed the words _and what the hell is that supposed to mean_ , when Jasper closes the distance between them, grabs Monty by the front of his shirt, and pulls him in for a hard kiss.  

They’ve never kissed before. Monty’s thought about it, in detail as true and as sharp as any memory’s could be, and in near infinite variations, but he never imagined it happening like this. And he never thought it would be this awkward, too insistent, their noses in the wrong places, their angles all wrong. Jasper too certain and Monty too uncertain all at once. He won’t pull back, though—he’s too afraid to know what will happen when he does—and Jasper doesn’t either, so they can’t help but get better, learning each other on a steep curve. Monty rests his palms against the sides of Jasper’s face. Jasper’s hands relax, uncurl, and slide down to Monty’s waist, where they rest with unexpected gentleness—as if, too late, he were starting to feel nervous too. 

It’s only when Monty moves one hand to the back of Jasper’s neck, feels how short his hair is, feels nothing where the collar of his shirt should be, that he finally snaps back to himself, and breaks away. 

“Need some air?” Jasper asks. He sounds a bit breathless himself, but his expression is unreadable. His eyes, bright and curious but giving nothing else away, scan over Monty’s face, while his hands, disconnected, minds of their own perhaps, start to untuck Monty’s shirt. 

“Need to—Jasper, what are we _doing_?” His mind keeps telling him he should push Jasper’s hands away, but he doesn’t really want to, not enough, so he just pretends he doesn’t notice them. 

Jasper rolls his eyes. “I think it’s pretty clear.” 

Monty’s shirt’s untucked by now, so Jasper goes to work on his hoodie, unzipping it all the way and then pushing it off Monty’s shoulders and to the floor. 

“No, it's not. You've been pushing me away for months and now—” He grabs at Jasper’s hands as they start to pull at the hem of his shirt, and Jasper pulls away just as quickly, this intimacy finally too much even for him. Hands holding hands too much for him. He bows his head and runs his hand through his hair, from the back of his neck up, a terribly awkward and young gesture that makes Monty want to gather him up and hold him close. Knowing he can’t actually, physically hurts. 

“I _need_ this, and I need to _not_ talk about it,” Jasper mumbles, almost inaudibly, down to the floor. 

Monty pictures himself leaving. He pictures himself closing the door on Jasper, ignoring his vulnerability, deaf to the word _need_ , a word that’s echoed in his own head for months and which a part of him has longed with near-desperation to hear—and he knows he could not bear it; he knows that no matter what, he’ll stay.  

Because this realization is beyond his ability to express, he just says, “Yeah, okay,” and doesn’t move. 

Jasper takes a step back and sits down on the edge of his bed. He makes no move to get dressed again, but Monty definitely will not take this as an invitation to stare. To distract himself, he grabs his hoodie off the floor and hangs it up on the back of the desk chair, the work of a moment, and then just stands awkwardly in the center of the room, slightly disheveled and foolish and uncertain. “You know this—this really wasn’t what I had in mind when I said I’d come back to your room,” he says. He tells himself they’re words meant to fill the silence only. As he speaks, he takes a step forward, and another, closer to the bed where Jasper’s sitting; his fake casual attitude is utterly transparent, and fools neither of them at all. 

Jasper snorts. “Yeah, right.” Then he reaches up and starts tugging at Monty’s belt, not undoing it, just bringing him a half-step closer, just an almost-meaningless touch. “You really didn’t think we’d end up in bed together”—now sliding the end of the belt free of its loops—“you thought we’d just talk, right?” and undoing the belt buckle, looking up only at the last word, a glance that makes Monty’s knees actually feel weak. 

He didn’t think that was something that happened in real life. 

“No, I know you’re not interested in talking with anyone anymore.” He wants to sound just as biting as Jasper does, but he can’t manage it. “But I didn’t predict you’d get naked in the first thirty seconds.” 

“Not like you haven’t seen me without clothes before.” He throws the belt to the floor, grabs Monty’s hips, and pulls him forward so roughly that his feet stutter and he almost falls—but he ignores this, too. 

It’s true that it’s hard to grow up together like they did, Monty half-living with the Jordans and Jasper half-living with the Greens, and not abandon a sense of privacy, harder still to share a tent for a month at the dropship site and hold on to modesty, but Monty just rolls his eyes. “Not like this.” 

“Fine, so tell me what should have happened.” Jasper’s voice sounds confident, but Monty notices how he won’t look up, how his words are so low they’re almost a mumble, how he distracts himself with Monty’s body, his movements so deliberate they might as well have been rehearsed. He pushes up Monty’s shirt, leans down to kiss his stomach and his side. 

It’s unfair, to ask questions like that, and then do things like _that_ ; he has to grab on to Jasper’s shoulder for balance and for a moment, his eyes close, it’s all just a little too much. 

“Thought we’d kiss,” he admits: a laughably tame answer. He thinks he can feel Jasper smiling. 

“Like this?” Press of his open mouth to Monty’s hip. 

“No.” 

If Jasper wants him to stop thinking, to bring them both to a place where they just act, just follow their instincts, and nothing else matters, and there is no past and no future and maybe even no Earth, just them and these broken station walls, this resurrected space vessel shell—then it’s working, it’s working more than he’d like to admit. 

“Then show me.”  

Jasper’s so close that Monty can feel the words, as well as he can hear them, pressed against the skin of his hip. They are quiet, slow, a drawn out hum, and they bring to mind very suddenly a certain period of their friendship, when they used to give each other stupid dares all the time. _I dare you to make Mr. Pike laugh during class. I dare you to wear my goggles for a whole day. I dare you to sneak into engineering._ Kid stuff, mostly, back then. 

The memories feel like someone else’s memories, not just another era but another life. 

He’s not sure if he’s running forward or, futilely, backwards again, when he pushes Jasper back against the bed and climbs on top of him. But it feels like the right thing to do. Safer to be kissing, somehow, so he knows Jasper’s mouth is occupied, so he won’t have to wonder what he’ll say or what dares he may try or what new wounds he may tear open again. Safer even though Jasper’s hands are where his mouth once was, even though this kiss is neither gentle nor easily contained, even though he’s sure that Jasper, beneath him, is controlling everything. He tries to pretend he’s confident. He has no idea what he’s doing—they are quickly approaching, maybe have already surpassed, the outer edge of his experience—but he knows what feels right and knows what Jasper seems to like and that’s enough to get from one second to the next, that’s more than enough. 

When Jasper starts to tug at his shirt again, he breaks the kiss just long enough to sit up and strip it off. He kicks his shoes off, too, because his dirt-covered heels have been shoving at the perfectly made sheets of the bed. Then his body is covering Jasper’s again and his mouth is on Jasper’s again, one of Jasper’s hands grabbing his hair and his hips pressing up against Monty’s, and it feels so _right,_ perfect even, the way Jasper’s body responds to his. 

Feeling braver, he starts to kiss down Jasper’s jaw, to his neck, which feels somehow like a very dangerous thing. It’s not because of the injury there, the bandage covering the wide gash that he carefully avoids, but because he can feel Jasper’s pulse here, because this is new, because it is more intimate than he had imagined it would be and thus seems to leave him perilously vulnerable and exposed. His touches reveal everything about him. They disclose a devotion not even Jasper himself could have guessed before. 

He wonders if Jasper can feel it, how hard his heart is beating, how his body thrums with nerves and need—wonders if he seems more confident than he is when he kisses Jasper’s pulse point just so, makes him moan. The sound echoes all the way through him. 

A part of him is sure he's crossed a final line too far. Jasper will push him away at any moment, angry maybe, furious— _how dare you_ —but if this is a ridiculous thought—this is just a kiss and how Jasper said he _needs_ this still rings in his ears—it's a familiar one by now. He's been waiting for months for Jasper to reject him. Time and again he's been sure they've reached that moment at last, where he just can't push any farther, when Jasper won't hold back and the unsaid will be said. This morning, even, he'd seen it coming. He felt it finally in the crack of his spine against the side of the Rover, saw it in Jasper's mad glare. He wasn't scared. A punch to the gut would at least be real, something physical to replace this constant pinprick ghost-guilt, something maybe like penance or restitution at last. 

But it didn't come then, and if this is it now, it's taken on a form so unexpected he can hardly recognize it for what it is or maybe could be. Jasper doesn't tell him _no_. He only tries to pull him closer, grabbing at him, at his hips, one finger hooking in his belt loop roughly. Small noises fill what has been, for so long, only silence; incoherent at first, they then resolve into words, Monty's name, whispered perhaps like a plea, perhaps as a curse. Doesn't matter—his confidence returns and he tells himself _just don't think_ , and starts to suck at Jasper's neck to leave a mark. His mark, a memory of him. 

Jasper makes a completely obscene noise, the sort of noise Monty wasn't aware human beings could even make, and which seems particularly alien coming from his best and oldest friend. It catches him off guard. He doesn't fight back when Jasper shoves at him, shoves him off then pulls him close again, so that they're lying side by side now but still tangled up together in the narrow one-person bed. For a half-moment, it feels like a struggle, and then they're only clinging to each other again. Kissing again. 

Jasper's skin is warm (and he can feel so much skin, can't believe he can feel so much skin), human-warm and his body is solid and real. How many times has he asked himself: was it worth it? Could it be? And now the answer comes to him clear and undeniable, like Jasper's beating heart and breathing lungs: he's here and he's safe and he's _alive_ , they've _survived_ , they're _together_ , he cannot regret anything that’s brought them here. It doesn't matter at all that it's rough. Doesn't matter that Jasper bites his lip between kisses or that he can feel nails at the back of his neck, tugging at his hair. He understands: this has been so long coming, there's no way to hold back what's been reigned in. 

Jasper starts to kiss along his jaw, open-mouthed desperate searching, all the way to his ear—bites his earlobe—hooks his ankle around Monty's ankle, as if he wanted him to trip, but Monty takes it as closeness, all these movements as awkward and scattered but sincere attempts at intimacy. Jasper hooks a finger through one belt loop and tugs, so that their hips jolt together, and at this Monty lets out a moan. Then hides his face in the hollow between Jasper's neck and shoulder. 

"Monty," Jasper whispers, right into his ear; his name has never sounded like a curse before and it takes all of his control, his self-restraint, not to pin Jasper again—he's sure he could, if he wanted to. He's breathing hard, breaths that are sometimes kisses, sometimes bites.  

And—"Monty"—his name again. And—"Fuck me"—words Monty mistakes for exclamation, for curses meant to disappear into the air. 

He pulls Jasper in for a kiss, hands to either side of his face like people do in romantic scenes in movies (Jasper always loved those scenes, used to pretend he didn't, but Monty could tell that he did, could always tell); he means the moment to be, in gesture, what he can't repeat in words. 

But Jasper only pulls away from him again, and stares at him with a gaze so harsh and threatening it brings Monty back to the morning again, to the moment of almost-violence that also felt like terrifying almost-release. He shoves his hand between them, turns his wrist, and the gesture feels mocking: _I know what I do to you, I know how hard you are because of **me**_. 

He wants to say _yeah so;_ he wants to mirror the touch, but skin to skin; and yet it feels crude; and worse than that he's nervous and hates that he's nervous and hates that this touch feels like a stranger's touch, yet still enough to short circuit everything, to make even simple thought untenable, clunky, and slow. He can't read Jasper's expression either, and so the jagged bits of comprehension that poke through are all of his worst fears: _this is nothing, you are nothing, you are there for the taking_. It's only when Jasper speaks and Monty hears the gravel uncertainty in his quiet voice, the anxiety, that his old words echo: _I **need** this and I need to **not** talk about it_. 

"I mean it. Fuck me." 

Now, of course, he sees the words for what they are. 

Every time he tries to look away, Jasper's gaze followed him. And when was the last time that Jasper managed to look him in the eye? Even in his violence, he broke after only a moment, shoulders slumped again and eyes on the floor. 

It's so _stupid_ (what is _wrong_ with him?), but he says: "I can't." His own voice sounds strangled. He's not sure if it's because of Jasper's hand, the certain press of the heel of his palm, or because he's being such an idiot, because a fool's voice is speaking through him, despite him. 

He's not surprised that Jasper argues, but his breath catches at how. One intake of breath and as he breathes out he hits the mattress hard, on his back, Jasper on top of him and Jasper’s hands pinning down his wrists. Monty just blinks up at him. Jasper himself looks surprised, eyes wide and expression uncertain, as if his actions were someone else’s actions—almost scared, as if his body, for a moment, became someone else’s body. But he doesn’t let go. He just leans down until they’re nose-to-nose close again, and murmurs, “You can. I want you to.” 

Then he uncurls his hands from Monty’s wrists, and slides his fingers through Monty’s fingers instead, as if this might convince him. It almost does. He pictures his hands linked with Jasper’s, the whole time. He pictures this simple connection, which already seems too intimate, because he can’t picture anything beyond that, and he wonders why he’s thinking so much, why his mind won’t just shut off and if this is what Jasper is asking himself too, if that’s why a worry line has formed between his brows. 

“Do I need to _say it_ , Monty?” 

It’s hard to imagine what he could say that he hasn’t yet, what could be more blunt or more honest or more outright. 

“Maybe.” 

This must be the wrong thing. He should have said, _no, I understand you always, I know you better than anyone_ : that’s what Jasper wanted to hear. But now the look on Jasper’s face makes his stomach twist with guilt, it is so pained, as if Monty had asked him to pull out his own insides or turn his skin inside out. As if, already raw and naked, almost as vulnerable as a person can be, Monty had asked him for more. Jasper’s eyes shut tight and his head bows, and his hands hold Monty’s tighter. Monty can hear him breathing and there’s something off in it, jagged and wrong.  

In his mind, Monty rehearses words of concern, but none seem right. None will form. All he wants to ask is _are you all right_ and all he can do is wait, because the answer to that question hasn’t been _yes_ in a long time. 

Jasper lets out a long breath that shades into a groan, and mumbles, “Fuck this,” almost inaudibly, and lets go of Monty’s hands. 

Monty would argue, or question this at least, but Jasper is lying on top of him and Jasper’s mouth is at his neck, distracting him, short-circuiting his thoughts and nothing matters. Nothing matters. It takes him a long moment to realize that Jasper’s hand has slid between them again, fingers fumbling for a half-second at the button of his jeans and then at his fly. 

“What—?” he starts, and Jasper looks up, not quite at him, at his eyebrow maybe or the wall beyond the bed. 

“You want me to stop?” 

_Stop what?_ seems like a stupid question, and Jasper’s hand is _so close_ and it’s been a long time, and he does want more, somehow, something. 

“No,” he breathes. The word rattles. He grabs the back of Jasper’s neck and pulls him into a hard kiss. “Not yet.” 

“Not yet,” Jasper repeats, words twisted by a hard, mean smile. And that’s all. Beyond that, there’s little room for talking. 

He keeps his eyes closed, so the rest of his senses are sharp, and won’t let Jasper break the kiss even for a moment—not that he seems to want to. Monty doesn’t want to know what sort of noises he might make if he could. It does not feel, somehow, like he was expecting, when Jasper wraps his hand around his cock. He cannot remember how he thought it would feel, though he has thought about it, uncountable times, imagined his own hand was Jasper’s hand, bringing himself to the edge with eyes shut tight and trying to remember the exact cadence of his best friend’s voice, but this is different, this is out of his control, new, unreal, too much, a tease, not enough. Too soon, there’s an urgency between them that wasn’t there before. Maybe it starts with Jasper but it’s in him now, too, spread from skin to skin. He doesn’t care, doesn’t care about anything now, but this; there’s a fuzziness like static in his head. If he had to put a name to it, he’d call it _need_. And fuck, _fuck_ —his back arches, Jasper’s mouth at his neck, his pulse point, and he grabs Jasper’s hips, feels soft skin and hard bone, his anchor and he can’t let go. 

Jasper’s hand fumbles between them—Monty’s not sure at first quite what he’s doing. Then—oh—he doesn’t have to look down to realize Jasper’s wrapped his hand around them both, and it takes all of him not to bite down hard on Jasper’s lip, from surprise maybe or shock, he doesn’t know. He just _needs_. He grabs for the back of Jasper’s neck, wants to slide his fingers through his hair but it’s too short, and if he’s afraid Jasper will leave him now, if this is an attempt to force him to stay, it is utterly unnecessary. Jasper’s tongue is in his mouth, pressed up, sliding against, his tongue. Jasper’s hand is stuttering and slow, but not uncertain, just awkward, just trying, and this is the most intimate thing Monty has ever felt, and a part of him can do no more than repeat this, again and again. A clear and quiet voice in his mind: 

_This is the closest we have ever been._

_This is the closest I have ever been to anyone._

It’s terrifying and it’s wrong and it’s perfect and he wants to stay here in this moment forever, just on the edge, and he wants more, and he wants to open his eyes, and he knows he cannot. Everything blurs; his thoughts grow erratic, and he’d be saying Jasper’s name, if he could; that’s all that’s left. 

He’s close. 

He’s close, he’s close, and he can hear Jasper, making uncertain, desperate noises, can feel the noises more than hear them, reverberations, echoes, in his mouth, and he’s not sure if the tension in his muscles is his or his friend’s but it’s almost too much, too much, until he feels all at once a seizing of his whole body, an arching of his back, a pressure down from above, a sense of _everything at once_ and also nothing, blankness, black, a pleasure short-circuit— 

He comes back to himself slowly, blinks open his eyes slowly. Above him he sees a fuzzy circle of light gray, shading out into dark gray and then black where the light of Jasper’s lamp can’t reach. He wants to take deep breaths, regain some rhythm in his lungs, but he can’t, because there is something heavy lying on top of him: Jasper, completely limp, his nose pressed against Monty’s neck and his mouth against Monty’s collarbone. He’s exhaling shaky breaths against Monty’s skin. 

Monty’s hands are resting, tentatively, randomly, on Jasper’s back. He can feel the thin sheen of sweat on his skin. That somehow feels more personal than anything else they’ve done, as if, of all of the secrets he now knows, this is the deepest and the darkest: what Jasper’s skin feels like, what the weight of his body feels like, what the rhythm of his breath sounds like, in the hazy aftermath of orgasm.  

Slowly, he recognizes a slight throbbing in his lip, and he searches out the source with his tongue. There: a pocket of sensitivity, a slight raised inflammation, right above his front teeth. He can’t quite remember, but he thinks Jasper must have bit him, bit down hard at the same moment he came, and just like the weight of Jasper’s body, or the beat-beat of his own heart, it meant nothing at the time, and too much now. He wonders if Jasper knows. He wonders if he should tell him. 

He wonders, what does one say, in these moments? 

_That was nice?_

_What do we do now?_

_I love you?_

His arms feel like weights but he forces them to move, tries to wrap them around Jasper in a proper hug. The gesture seems to trigger something in Jasper, though, and in the next moment, he pulls himself up and then drops his body down, heavily, on the other side of the bed, facing the wall. He stretches out, so long that his feet reach out past the foot of the bed, then half-curls in around himself again. Small movements follow. Monty holds his breath. He’s afraid to touch him, though he wants to, afraid to move even the slightest bit: if Jasper hears him, will he ask him to leave?  

There’s a black hole in the middle of him, a growing, gnawing feeling of wrongness: the emptiness that comes with denial and guilt. It’s too familiar. It’s that vile nausea that comes with asking _what have I done?_

The bed is too small—the side of his arm is touching Jasper’s back—but they could be miles apart; he thinks perhaps this feeling is loneliness, too. 

“Monty,” a tired sleep-thick voice startles him.  

This is it, he thinks. This is Jasper telling him to get out.  

“Monty,” it says again. “Turn off the light.” 

Oh. 

That’s all. 

The only light is Jasper’s desk lamp, three shaky steps away from the bed. His legs feel hollow. They feel like someone else’s legs, like new legs he doesn’t yet know how to use. He hesitates to put his weight on them. When he clicks the lamp off, the room will be in total darkness: it has no windows, and the circadian knows it is, he’s not sure, midnight maybe, or 1 am, by now, and time for blackness. So he takes a moment, first, to look over his shoulder and pretend he’s doing nothing more than gauging the distance back. Jasper’s so quiet and so still that Monty doesn’t know if he’s awake or not. His unfamiliar vertebrae, his thin frame, the way he’s pulled one knee up toward his chest, all make him look vulnerable and young. None of the debauchery that Monty feels on himself has stuck to him. 

It feels too intimate, and too presumptuous, to take off his jeans, but he does fix himself up a little. He takes off his socks. He tells himself he doesn’t want to know what he looks like, if he’s changed, if when he leaves Jasper’s quarters people will see him and somehow just _know_. He’s sure somehow they’ll _know_. 

Jasper makes a vague grumbling noise, twitches, but doesn’t turn, and Monty breaks himself free from his trance, turns off the light, and stumbles back to bed. He’s slept side by side with Jasper more times than he can count, and for as long as he can remember: slept together because they couldn’t be pried apart, because they dozed off watching movies or pretending to do schoolwork, because they lost track of time and couldn’t be bothered to leave whichever station they were in and trek home. And it has never been weird. This feels weird. He slides under the blanket and pulls it up over his shoulders, tries to keep some space between them but there’s not enough room. He can’t. He can feel the heat from Jasper’s body. Every tiny movement creates sounds, gentle night sounds that he’d never be able to hear if they were still in space, not over the low drone of all of the machinery that kept them alive.  

Earth can be so quiet, sometimes. 

He’s not sure he’ll ever be used to it. 

He lies very still in the darkness for a very long time, trying to listen to nothing, but listening to everything. He listens to the sound of Jasper’s even breathing and imagines it as a series of waves. He imagines it’s the sound of the ocean, washing him away from the shore and out, out and away, out finally to sea. 


	3. part three

In front of him a series of shapes. For a second or two, they have no meaning at all.  

Then a slow series of realizations, each coming to him gently, building one upon the next. 

Monty knows that he is lying on a narrow strip of mattress and that he has no pillow, and that he’s using his arm for one instead. It’s aching and dead from an unknown number of hours in this position, weighted down by his head and a series of oppressive, uncertain dreams. He knows that he’s curled up on his side and that there is something warm behind him, warm like humans are warm, pressed up against his back.  

He stares and stares at the shapes ahead, long after they resolve themselves into Jasper’s desk and chair and wall, long after he’s remembered every detail of the night before. Long after he’s realized that it’s Jasper’s back, pressed against his back. 

He’s not sure what to do, and he’s afraid that if he moves, Jasper will wake. 

But when he allows himself to shift, just a little, trying to find a bit of comfort despite the sore feeling between his shoulder blades, it is only his arm that comes alive again. He bites his lip and closes his eyes tight as bright pinpricks of pain, pins and needles, shoot across his skin. He sits up slowly and carefully. Winces when he has to put weight on the arm. Clenches his teeth as he tries to shake the tiny sharp stabs off his skin. It will go away soon, he knows. He just needs a distraction. 

The pain is the distraction. 

When it subsides at last, as suddenly as it came, he lets out a long breath and, just for a moment, closes his eyes. The quiet of the room strikes him, how utterly still everything is. Even the slight movements of Jasper’s body as his lungs fill with air and release, even the creak of the mattress as Monty shifts his weight, swings his legs over the edge of the bed and lets his feet hit the floor, even these disturbances seem to mean nothing at all. He glances over his shoulder. He follows the lines of Jasper’s body, the curves of his ear and his shoulder, the long slope of his back, and he tries to remember what last night felt like, but all of the memories feel like hallucinations and the moment he grabs on to them, truly _knows_ that they happened to him, his skin starts to crawl and he feels sick. 

He stands, paces back and forth a little, but the nausea doesn’t ease. Jasper is sleeping the sleep of the dead, and doesn’t stir. 

Jasper’s clothes are in a small pile on the floor near the foot of the bed, and Monty’s shirt and socks and hoodie are strewn not far off, his shoes kicked accidentally half under the bed so that only the heels still show. He cannot find his belt. He doesn’t care. He leaves everything where it is and stands in the middle of the room, scratching at a stain on his pants and pretending he doesn’t know where it came from, wondering what he is supposed to do now, what will happen next, when Jasper will wake. It does not occur to him to leave. How could he, when Jasper _needed_ him? 

Eventually, he walks over to the desk and sits down, slumping forward while he waits for whatever will happen next. Feeling uncertain and restless, he distracts himself with fidgeting, exploring the few small objects Jasper has left behind. He traces the edges of Jasper’s music player, follows the thin white cord of the ear buds, pulls the ear buds out and then plugs them back in again. He fiddles with the desk lamp. He reaches out, finally, for the stuffed bear propped up against the wall, turns it over in his hands and rubs his thumb back and forth against the fur. Where does he know it from? Where has he seen it before? It’s not from the Ark, for sure; they didn’t have real stuffed animals in space and anyway, there’s no sheen of nostalgia on this thing. It does not remind him of childhood. 

That’s how he realizes it must be from the Mountain. 

“It was a gift.” 

Monty jumps, startled, a shot of fear-adrenaline making him straighten and drop the toy—it lands on its back on the desk with its stubby limbs up in the air. Jasper doesn’t seem to notice. He’s turned over on his other side now and propped his head up on his hand, and he’s staring at Monty like he’s reading him, or waiting for an answer. Or not needing one, just waiting. 

But Monty has no idea what to say so Jasper just keeps talking. “I didn’t steal it. Mrs. Ryan gave it to me, after I donated blood. She came to visit—” 

His voice, clear and steady like the voice of someone reading from a script, neutral and distant, cracks without warning and Monty turns away. He picks the bear up and sets it upright. When he looks back again, Jasper is staring at the wall, at some spot far above Monty’s head. 

“When I was in the infirmary. She told me about her daughter. Died young, I guess, but would have been our age. And she asked about living in space and what—what the ground was like.” 

Monty’s pretty sure Jasper’s not really looking at the wall anymore, that he’s seeing something else, a scene from a past so far away that it seems like it must be from an ancient time, and so close that it haunts like a recurring dream. 

“Mrs. Ryan was really nice,” Monty answers, when it’s more than obvious that Jasper’s not going to say anything else. He slides the bear back across the desk, so it’s sitting with its back against the wall, like before. The words are stupid but at least he has them. They’re easier than trying to describe what it was like to see a human being shot right in front of him, his brain screaming and screaming at him to move but his body unable to move, his body turned frigid and immovable by pure survival instinct until the guards had finished their search and taken the others away and it was just him and the silence and a dead body face down on the floor, his heartbeat pounding in his ears and his fingers shaking. 

“Yeah, she was,” Jasper says. “So when I saw some Alpha fuck take that bear, I just grabbed it. Fucking graverobbers think it’s first-come first-served out there. Like they don’t even remember that some of us—” 

“They don’t.”  

His voice is so much harsher than he’d meant it to be. But one glance over at Jasper and Monty knows he understands; their target, for the moment, is the same.  

“They don’t want to think about what happened to us in there," he continues. "Why should they? It’s over.” 

“Not for everyone.” 

A week ago, even a day ago, Monty would have assumed that Jasper was speaking only of himself. _It is not over for me._ This is the gap, wide and unbreachable, that separates them now: how for Jasper the wound opens again every day; how for Monty every emotion hits with blunted force, like there’s something permanently broken about the part of him that feels.  

This time, though, he’s not sure. Maybe Jasper means _it’s not over for us_ and maybe that phrase, hanging there between them, might mean more than one thing, and maybe this is an olive branch, even more than Jasper’s hand on his arm last night was, even more than all of last night was. 

“Maybe,” he says finally. The word sounds wrong, feels wrong in his mouth; words aren’t supposed to feel like this. Like trying to hold marbles in your mouth. He slides his thumb across the edge of the desk, as if it were sharp enough to cut, and he’s irrationally disappointed when its blunt corner does not even leave a mark. “Maybe someone—some of us need to be the ones who remember.” Maybe, he means, it’s too much for most of them. Maybe it would be easier if what happened in Mt. Weather were forgotten, but it can’t be forgotten, because it took too much of him to do it and because those people, even the monstrous ones, deserve some small flicker of memory of them to live on. And maybe it’s the responsibility of the ones who lived through it to keep that small flicker from burning out. 

It's just a tentative thought, no more than a flicker itself. 

“I think that’s bullshit,” Jasper’s flat voice answers, and Monty’s hand grabs at the desk edge again, hard, like he’s falling. 

“If you could forget it, would you?” 

He asks the question without thinking at all, and for a second, it feels like a dark, hollow version of old times. They used to ask each other questions like this, hard questions, ones you really had to think about it: cruel funhouse mirror _would you rather_ s. It would be late at night, usually. High starting to wear off. Stomach muscles sore and aching from laughter, from laughing at some stupid jokes they’d been telling each other, and into the silence, one of them might say _if you could live on Earth, but you were transported there two months before the bombs, would you do it?_ Looking back, he sees that this macabre tint was the start of adolescence: twelve, thirteen, years old, tipsy off nothing, shattered in the early morning hours after an all-night party down on Tesla, crashing between the old storage boxes and staring up into the ceiling like staring up into nothingness itself, and those were the thoughts that came into their heads. 

_If you could be the Chancellor, but you had to kill someone, would you do it?_

_Uh, no—who would want to be Chancellor anyway?_

_Okay, true. If you **had** to be the Chancellor, and you could get out of it by killing someone, would you do it?_

_Now **there’s** a question._

Minutes pass, and Jasper doesn’t answer, and Monty forgets what he’s waiting for. When he glances back toward the bed, he sees that Jasper’s turned over onto his back. He’s staring up at the ceiling, hands folded over his chest. The image looks grossly wrong, disturbing, but Monty can’t figure out what’s so jarring in it. 

He looks away again, just as Jasper asks, “Monty have you ever kissed anyone?” 

So that's how it’s going to be. 

“Before last night I mean,” Jasper clarifies. 

“Yeah.” He only sounds a little bit defensive, a thin edge of emotion right where the word meets silence. 

“Why didn’t you ever tell me about it?” 

What can he possibly say to that? Jasper's watching him out of the corner of his eye and waiting. And how is he supposed to answer? _I didn’t think you’d want to hear me talk about boys?_ That’s what it comes down to: that if he liked girls, if his first awkward, random, uncertain, experimental kiss had been with a mysterious girl instead of a strange boy, he’d have been able to say like it was nothing—like it was _everything_ and his best friend just needed to know _now_ —that this first kiss thing had happened for him, inexplicably, amazingly. As it actually happened, there just weren’t the words. 

“Never came up,” he answers. 

“It’s come up now.” 

Monty thinks there should be some stupid joke in here somewhere, but he doesn’t really want to search for it. “It was on the Ark,” he answers, instead, a slight break after the first word like his voice is stumbling. “At the Unity Dance—the last one before we came down.” 

“Yeah, I remember we were supposed to meet up,” Jasper says. “But I couldn’t find you. Guess now I know what you were doing.” The corner of his mouth turns up in a smile, but one without humor. “Was it someone hot?” 

This might be a trick, might be just another trap set for him to walk into, but Monty pretends he doesn’t notice, or doesn’t care. “Yeah. Yeah, he was hot.” And when Jasper doesn’t answer, when the trap doesn’t spring: “He was another kid from Farm, but we didn’t really know each other. He asked me to dance. It was—fun for a while. But I kind of lost track of him when the party got broken up.” 

“Did you find him again later?” 

It’s hard to tell, Jasper’s voice is so carefully neutral, all that emotion he never knew how to hide now so easily obscured, but Monty thinks he might be actually, truly curious. 

“Yeah. A couple days later. We had a really stilted conversation and then a little while later I found out he’d started dating someone else.” He shrugs. “And then we got arrested anyway.” 

“Yeah, nothing like the Sky Box to put a damper on your sex life,” Jasper answers, which is obviously a joke, because almost everyone hooked up in the Sky Box. But he doesn’t laugh, and Monty doesn’t either. “So—did you, though? Hook up with him? Or—anyone?” 

Another one of those questions, personal and intimate. But no accusation to it this time; just quiet curiosity. 

“Yeah." He hesitates, just for a half-second. "Yeah, I mean, this guy gave me a hand job last night." He tries to keep a straight face but can’t quite manage it, a small self-satisfied smile slipping in. Maybe because he feels safe trying to joke again. Maybe because he’s proud to give nothing away. Maybe because he’s proud to talk so casually about something that still makes his heart pound when he thinks of it. 

Jasper laughs, but just once, a short bark directed up toward the ceiling. “Lucky guy,” he mumbles. 

Monty’s ears burn. He feels his own expression change, something stupidly shy creeping up in him. He looks down at his bare feet. And to his right, he catches the subtle sounds of Jasper shifting: shoulder blades against sheets, feet shoving at blankets; when he glances over, he sees that Jasper’s turned his head to look at him. Or maybe he’s focusing on a spot above his head or over his shoulder, some safe bit of wall, as he asks, “And other than last night?” 

He shakes his head. “No. Never.” 

He doesn’t ask the same question back. He already knows, anyway; if Jasper had ever been with anyone, a girl, Monty would know about it, because Jasper was never the secret keeping kind. Unless maybe it was Maya. Maybe he never would have mentioned that. But that’s just another reason, now, that Monty can’t ask, because he can’t say her name, can’t even talk around her or approach her memory. He doesn’t dare. 

He's looking down at the little white box, tracing the white cord to the little white ear buds, when Jasper asks, with more confidence this time, “Why didn’t you tell me? About the guy at the dance?” 

“How could I tell you?” Monty counters. There is an unexpected brutal force to the words, and it makes him sit up straighter, shocks him as much as it does Jasper, who just stares at him with wide eyes for a moment and then looks away. Monty runs his hands over his face, and gathers up the first words he can to fill the silence. “How could I—tell you about a guy? You wouldn’t have understood.” 

“ _I_ wouldn’t have understood?” Jasper leans up on his elbows, stares at Monty in pure disbelief. His collar bones are sharper than Monty remembered them, and the bandage on his neck is all the whiter, all the more ghastly, in contrast to the hard points of his shoulders and the tendons on his neck. But somehow still beneath that wild look he always has now, he looks almost like he used to. In his eyes, there’s something old and familiar, an energy Monty was sure had died. “I have two dads, Monty. And we’ve known each other since we were...since we were _embryos_. I’d never hate you for some stupid shit like that.” 

_Right_ , Monty hears himself answer in his own head, _not for stupid shit. But for—needing to save you—_

“That’s not what it sounded like to me.” 

For a moment, he’s sure Jasper has no idea what he means. Then, like an outtake of breath, his gaze slides down, and his whole expression falters, and Monty knows he remembers exactly how it was. How they could hear the Tesla night workers stomping arrhythmically outside. How they kept asking each other _you awake? you awake?_ How the silences grew longer and longer until, into a pause so long it should have signaled sleep itself, he confessed. Uncertain words in the dark. He didn't really get it, when Jasper talked about girls. Girls just...weren't for him.  

And in response only quiet, and the rustling of sheets, a dip in the bed as Jasper turned his back.  

"I know you were just pretending to be asleep."  

Jasper's fingers clench against the sheets. The gesture would be obscene, Monty thinks, in a different context: that image of fingertips grasping for anchor. It would be obscene, if the rest of his body were not so tense and the look in his eyes wasn't that familiar grim anger, like accusation. "Yeah," he says. The word is short and sounds like it's caught in his throat. "I was pretending. Because I felt you reaching for my hand, and I _know_ you, Monty—you were going to keep talking. You were going to say you had feelings for me. I didn't feel that way and I didn't want—I didn't want to get into it and ruin things."  

It's funny, the hollow dead feeling Monty gets in his chest at the thought of _ruination_ between them.  

"Then what was last night?" he asks, bitter and ruined and quiet.  

Jasper falls back on the bed; the mattress bounces back up, in its own tired way, at the sudden drop of his weight. "You can't compare me and what I do to some dead kid you used to know."  

"You're not dead!” Monty snaps. One blissful moment of not thinking. “And last night _happened_. Just—" He wants to tear out his hair. He wants to be violent, like Jasper is sometimes violent. But that is not allowed him. “Why? If it wasn’t about me, then why—why invite me here?” The rest— _why kiss me, why ask me to fuck you, why get me off_ —hangs in the air. He can hear the questions so loud in his own head, clanging like noisy ghosts, repeating and repeating and repeating into the silence that stretches between them, that he starts to wonder if perhaps he has said them out loud after all.  

“Because,” Jasper says finally. His voice is quiet and Monty slides forward in his chair, into the gap between them, to hear. “I wanted to _feel_ something.” 

Monty doesn’t understand. All Jasper’s done for three months is deaden himself, drinking Arkadia dry to drown his raw emotion before it drowns him. And some sick part of Monty has envied him, because he’s been walking through his own life like covered in gauze, his senses muffled, his gaze distorted, his very memories unreal. 

“Something different,” Jasper’s saying. “Something that would hurt. And I wanted to know why it hurt and that I could control it and that it would stop. Physical pain. I—don’t know how to explain it, Monty.” 

“Try.” He’s pulled his chair forward, bent over his own knees with his hand over his mouth. The word gets caught between his fingers. He’s staring at Jasper and willing himself to understand, and Jasper is running his fingertips back and forth over the scar on his chest, and staring up. 

“Physical pain,” he says, into the pause, gently trying out each syllable. “Everyone understands that. You get hurt and it sucks but then times passes and it eases and you heal. Like…that spear—that was the worst pain I’d ever felt. All I remember from the delirium was being sure I was going to die. But now all that’s left is this scar. Just this scar that means ‘I survived this thing, my body was injured, and it repaired itself.’” He pauses for a moment, but Monty doesn’t interrupt. He watches the way Jasper’s chest rises and falls with each breath. 

“Or when that Grounder put his knife to my neck—” He smiles at the memory. His mouth splits into that same frightening grin from the day before, and Monty feels a shiver like a warning pricking up the skin of his arms. “I know it will leave a scar too and then that scar will fade and _that’s_ what I want. To know it will hurt and then it will heal. The rest…” He slides his hand up, over his collarbones, tracing the edges of the bandage on his neck slowly. The movement looks so absent, so disconnected from the expression on his face, that Monty wonders for a moment if he even knows what he’s doing. “This other pain isn’t going away. I’m not healing. It’s like I’m just hemorrhaging more and more and more every day and I’m not _dying_ , I’m just stuck here in some sort of _limbo_ —” 

His voice breaks at the word _dying_ , the last words distorted by tears and his own uneven breath. His fingers clench. They press into the wound until he winces, and his fingernails start to scrabble at the edge of the bandage. _He’s going to tear himself apart_ , a clear, calm voice in Monty’s head says, and without thinking, he slides forward onto the floor until he’s on his knees next to the bed and he’s grabbed Jasper’s hands and trapped them in his own. Jasper struggles, fights him, but only for a moment. 

Then he’s just crying, quiet but ugly, sitting up now in bed and curled in tight around himself. 

Monty sits on the edge of the bed and wraps an arm around Jasper’s shoulders. His other hand holds Jasper’s hands still, so tight it hurts. There’s nothing to say and no way to make this better so he just mumbles, “I got you,” a few times, and then not even that; he waits this out; he closes his eyes and thinks about how thin Jasper’s shoulders are and how awful it is to hear this sort of jagged, breathless crying, and how he just wishes it would _end_ —except that then, he’ll probably have to let him go. 

After a while, Jasper sniffs loudly, and wipes at his eyes with the back of his wrist. 

But he doesn’t say anything, so Monty finds himself saying, “If you wanted someone to hurt you, you shouldn’t have picked me.” 

Jasper shakes his head. “That’s not what I meant.” His voice still sounds wet and congested; he coughs and clears his throat before he says anything more. “I mean that if you were inside me, I wouldn’t be able to think about anything else.” 

Monty can’t see Jasper’s face, so he doesn’t know if he’s blushing like Monty himself is. It’s stupid, how easily he says these things, and then doesn’t react to them at all. It’s all so stupid, but it’s all coming together, too, in Monty’s mind. All Jasper wanted was a distraction from his own mind, pain or pleasure or some combination of the two, it didn’t matter, just something physical to tell him he was still alive, that his body still worked like it was supposed to even though his brain no longer did. And Monty was convenient: the only other body around that Jasper hasn’t yet pushed away, a fool who loves him still, with the sort of blind devotion Jasper could so easily twist to his will. 

“And you were wrong before,” Jasper mumbles, now, when Monty doesn’t answer. “It _was_ about you. It couldn’t have been anyone else but you. Fuck—sometimes I think you’re the only part of me that’s still alive.” 

Monty wishes there were something romantic he could say to that. He sits for a long time and waits for the right words to come. Maybe something about how he’d do anything for Jasper, to keep him alive, because he _is_ alive and the pain is how he knows it’s true—but that isn’t romantic. Doing anything for someone you love isn't romantic. That’s a tragedy. And they both already know it, all too well. 

“I want to tell you that it’s going to get better—” he tries, instead, and Jasper tenses for a moment in his arms. 

“But you can’t. I know. Just don’t say anything.” Slowly, carefully, like he’s afraid his limbs won’t quite work, Jasper sits up and pulls away. He hesitates for a moment. Then he rests his hand against Monty’s cheek. The gesture is so unexpected and so gentle that Monty’s whole body freezes and he has no idea what to do. 

But when Jasper looks away, like he’s embarrassed, and starts to pull back, Monty grabs him by the shoulders and yanks him forward again. He kisses him before he can stop himself. He tells himself _this is reckless and dumb_ and he doesn’t care. It’s the only answer he has. 

When they separate, they’re breathless. Jasper’s fingers are in his hair. Their noses are touching. Monty’s holding on to Jasper’s shoulders like if he lets go, they’ll both fall, because he’s pretty sure they will. They’ll fall if they let go and that’s why they have to stay right here, together, right where they are. 


End file.
